105420-why-its-empty-everywhere
Content ---- ---- ---- ---- No. It's due to the ridiculously broken classes. Once class balance passes are finished, population will likely go up again. Until that happens, expect low numbers. There will also likely be a large number of rerolls due to balance passes. I expect there will be far less warriors and engineers. On that note: Hey Carbine, what level is your Esper? ;) | |} ---- DIdn't expers just get a nice little buff ? Maybe i read the patch notes wrong /shrug. | |} ---- ---- I thought most of those were just for attention, so they were serious ?...damn :( | |} ---- No, but class imbalance doesn't cause people to leave. For the OP, if I had to put my finger on anything, it's that the leveling was too easy to make it trivial and the endgame is anything but. If leveling had been an enforced long slog through 50 levels in 6 months, then attunement took two weeks with an elder gem cap, it'd be one thing. If people could fly through leveling by skipping loads of quests and blow right into easymode raids, that would be another thing. Carbine thought it would be best if they made it easier for people to get to raiding, but expected them to put in the time and work to attune. What ended up happening is that people faceplanted into a content wall. For the most part, people sucked it up and kept going. The exodus isn't as bad as you'll hear, it's just exacerbated by the fact that people hit the elder gem cap and have little reason to do anything in the game for the shits and giggles, so they don't log in awhile. However, if I had to say a real issue why people are really leaving, that's it. You can skip your way to 50, but once you hit 50 everything is a rabid time sink, and the contrast leaves a lot of people feeling like there's nothing to do at 50. If anything, Carbine might help retention most by spreading the grind out at endgame, so that it feels like progress and people always have a reason to log on and work towards something. It doesn't even have to necessarily take less time or effort; it could take more. It just needs more consistency instead of the stop-and-go. And PVP was a big issue for a while, though that's getting sorted out to a large degree. Still issues, but the last patch made it leaps and bounds better for that playing population. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- Housing gives u bonus rest exp.Housing gives u easy mats with a farming circle. Housing now has crafting station,crafting vendor and rune socket machine. Housing gives u gardening easy mats to grow. You can que for pvp,dungeons or whatever while u are getting bonus rest exp. Ppl enjoy decorating their house can be a decent time sink. Oh yea u can also dye your costumes at your house as well. Out questing and your inventory full? No worries click on that 20min cooldown housing teleport and vendor your junk at the crafting station and step on the exit portal to teleport exactly where u were before. (It's much faster than going to the city and porting back at whatever portal u binded too) Basically aside from the auction house u have no reason to actually see ppl now. Oh almost forgot you can check your mail and use your bank at your house. Sucks but I really hope we get more pve content and the main city becomes more useful. Maybe fishing will help whenever it gets added? Nah who am I kidding carbine will add fishing ponds on our house or sum lol. Never seen a company go out of it's way to make the main city useless. They really really need to at least make housing zone chat and city zone chat combined at the very least. Merging is irrelevant. Merge or no merge aside from the auction house u still won't really actually see anyone. | |} ---- Unless you play for the other 85% of the whole game (PvE). Every class change in that patch was because of PvP and only one change actually benefited PvE (Esper mobility). @OP - Seriously, if you think your server is that bad, welcome to an MMO launch. This is what happens. Open beta + headstart + first month = tons of players, most of them just trying the game out because they saw a google ad or heard from a friend. These people would likely have left regardless of what class they played, how easy/hard the game is, or really anything else anyway. Month two + three + four = Slowly getting the real MMO players to join as the game is ironed out. The gaming community is split on when to purchase and start playing an MMO, some feel it's best to get an early start (play from Launch), but a great number also say that you need to let the game balance out a bit before jumping it. If you really think the game is in a bad state ~2 months after launch, it shows that this is your first launch title. Welcome to MMOs! | |} ---- so that's where everyone has been hiding? well shucks pa | |} ---- I would agree with thisa but there's one problem. Most MMORPGers are Peacockish. Not long ago most Auction areas at the Spaceport were overrun with people. Also, I'm in a Relic Farming Circle with 30 other people. I got 1 mail today. That's after not logging in for 3 days. | |} ---- Hey, PVPers are people, too, and Warrior damage was (and may still be) a little high. Class balancing's a thing, I guess I'm more relaxed about it since I have bad altitis and I expect random nerfs and buffs over time. I didn't hear 85% of the community complaining when the PVPers were getting Carbine to wind up that nerfbat and I'm withholding judgement on their overall effect on PVE for a week or so yet, at the very least. The only thing that definitely needed fixed after that was Warriors' abysmal threat generation, which got a hotfix. I mean, I get that people don't like nerfs, but you'd think they'd removed relentless strikes and given it to the engineers. I'll take some time to gauge how much damage I'm doing after I adjust a bit. | |} ---- Could be ppl just not bothering to login anymore but hey even if they do u probably wouldn't see them anyway lol. Wow 1mail is pretty bad though considering u in a circle. | |} ---- Evindra has no population issues, but I don't think I see THAT many people at the main cities. Especially not now that people have such badass housing. There's even a vendbot in the crafting area. The second I get a CX on my housing, I'll never go to town. Why would I, when people on my server are building bars and places to hang out on their plots? Being on the RP server is just so awesome sometimes. | |} ---- Of course PvPers are people, and that has nothing to do with the equation. In almost every MMO the game is generally built around PvE. This is evident by quests, dungeons, raids, etc. It is especially evident in WildStar due to the fact that when creating the world, PvP wasn't even an afterthought, it was less. There is no real open-world PvP. There's just some BGs and arenas. If you had read anything on reddit or the PTR portion of these forums you would have seen the intelligent arguments using fancy math and big words talking about how every class change would affect PvE negatively. They even made a hotfix to fix the medic changes that they literally said would not make it to live. Then, just to throw salt in the wounds, they ninjaed in changes as well. | |} ---- Ah CX fabkit for housing I personally hope it never ever ever happens.I'm amazed at how often I see it mentioned and requested. I honestly can't think of anyway to ensure a our main city is a ghost town other than to do something crazy and add a CX fabkit. I really think it's a bad idea and I hope carbine never ever does it. People really want the main city to be absolutely useless. | |} ---- ---- Like I said, I'm very wary of gnashing my teeth at Carbine's class balancing when I've both had worse done to my classes and I'm not entirely sure they were unnecessary. It's a bit premature to say the fixes aren't justifiable, especially since I never saw PVE and PVP mechanics as some sort of mutually-exclusive partisan argument. With that said, I was actually talking at some length about simply including ability modifications (through cheap, purchasable buffs) that make it into instanced PVE and PVP areas exclusively. After removing capping mechanisms, these can be some of the earliest things you can buy that improve your character's performance. They'd be quick to get and cheap to buy because they're the tunable portion for their respective areas of expertise, and also things that immediately make you better for those instances (and only those you buy them for at the time). It seemed easier to do that because then we would know if something was buffed/debuffed overall and quit blaming the other side for somehow harming our own experience. That was a possible solution, but I'm not even sure it's an actual versus perceived problem yet. I'm very wary of stepping in and saying class nerfs and buffs aren't justified until I'm very sure, because class balancing is an issue that tends to strip people's dignity. I'm not at all saying yet that it didn't go to far, but I'm not yet ready to call it that just yet for most cases. I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other, but I certainly have less love for the central city. I think I lost that when Shattrath opened up in BC in WoW and essentially, for all intents and purposes, killed Stormwind and Orgrimmar. Even though they were the only place you could go to do auctions (ironically). I had a love of Stormwind, and it was sad to see it deserted. But it did perhaps callous me to the loss of a central city. In the end, I'm not sure whether it's better to have people hanging around in a central city as a population demonstration or to allow them to escape the bustle in their housing for all intents and purposes. I recall enjoying many central cities and their bustling centers, but I also vividly recall disliking them when they got too busy, especially as it didn't often make the playerbase more sociable, it just put more blue nameplates in the Trade District. | |} ---- ---- Yeah, the artificial caps may have served some slight function in slowing down raiders from clearing the content too quickly, but obviously the content's not easy enough to just float through even for the best raids in the game, so they're a bit overkill now. They'd be best served by removing the caps. and just tuning drops of currencies to best align to their timeframes. At least then people would always have a reason to be on. The only other issue that can help that is content, and content takes time. | |} ---- Agree with all of that 100%. Personally, I would've been quite happy with a trip to 50 that took 2-3 times as long. Same content, just spread out more. Slow it even more past 45 or so, and speed up the attunement process. It'd feel like there was no sudden change of pace. | |} ---- ---- That wasn't a buff, that was the first move in the direction of fixing a class. IIRC, drop four is the buff. Unless you're one of those that thinks 3% really is a buff. | |} ---- What exact sever are you on that might help. Some have issues some don't. | |} ---- ---- 3% is better than 0%... not saying it's a buff but it's better than nothing. Class balance is something that is always changing, carbine will never get it right it's always going to be back and forth. WoW had 10 years and still struggles with balance. | |} ---- they serve different purposes, a transfer is just a service to people that want to change servers for whatever reason merges are to concentrate playerbase so that everyone gets a better experience I would be all for them just for the sake of having more people around but as it stands now it seems most servers are running an extreme faction imbalance towards exiles and usually a merge takes servers that have opposite imbalances to make a better overall population | |} ---- You're telling me stuff that I already know. Anyway, brony mods about, I'll drop this so the topic can continue. | |} ---- Hey, people were bitching about PVP being nothing but a giant zerg fest run by medic healers, who made the PVP unplayable. And, to be fair, I don't hear that PVP is broken by a majority of the population by the changes. It sounds like the people who are complaining now are coming from different places. Everyone I know that PVPs took the good with the bad, a few loved it, I'd say the lowest portion outright feel like it broke them. Most of the people pissed off by the changes blamed the PVP patch for "breaking" their classes in PVE. Nobody said anything about the bitching going on here about things working just fine in PVP, so now I'm very skeptical about how the balancing changed everything. If it went really wrong, this is what happens when all anyone does on a forum is complain when things don't work right and don't get on Carbine to ignore public opinion. They will fix things, the things you like will be sacrificed to appease the people who are complaining. And people wonder why I throw a positive post around now and again to make sure Carbine doesn't change the stuff I really like unless they desperately need to. | |} ---- This makes up the majority of the people I've had on my guild roster. The problem as I see it is that we have a ton of capable gamers but they are also limited on time because of RL responsibilities. There are also members that play 12+ hours a day and in past games it really wasn't an issue bringing the two types of players together. In Wildstar a separation forms because of this content wall where the longer you're offline not doing those "tasks" the further away you get from your other friends. Eventually you're just a liability with content you need to complete that few people now want to do since it's time consuming, low margin of error, and tedious. I love this game, I really do. But man, it's been a long time since I've seen such a cockblock to any real character progression. Even PVPers need to raid to truly be competitive because frankly, I don't see the actual PVP gear in every slot as optimal for many classes. Whatever the problem may be with population...I'd have to say that taking a look at the auction house on Page-Exiles is enough to tell me there's something seriously wrong. EXAMPLE: 1) Searching my AH for Engineer guns level 1-50 only shows 2 pages of results. In June it was probably 15 pages of items. 2) Searching my AH for Medium armor from level 1-50 shows about the same. It's clear the population is dwindling rapidly. Server mergers need to happen ASAP. Carbine needs to swallow their pride and make it happen for the sake of the remaining community if they care about our enjoyment in a game that requires grouping to succeed at 50. | |} ---- ---- I agree with LL Cool J. As much as i want a AH/CX in the house it would take away 90% of what is left of players in cities lol. | |} ---- ---- Because the population has learned it's better to salvage gear/weapons than it is to vendor/auction them. Especially when you're running with a crafting profession as it saves you more money in the long run. Part of the reason why the servers look empty is because of Carbine's poor choice in splitting the population into zone instances without giving the players the option of being able to switch between them on the fly. So you can have a zone that has +50 people, but only see 10 players because everyone is split over 5 instances. Getting rid of that, or allowing us to change instances will go far in helping getting rid of the empty zone feeling. | |} ---- ---- Totally weird because its the exact opposite for me. Well there is no accounting for taste... | |} ---- ----